


Daddy Sings Bass

by Orokiah



Category: Defiance (TV)
Genre: Episode Related, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-17
Updated: 2013-05-17
Packaged: 2017-12-12 01:50:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/805743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orokiah/pseuds/Orokiah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When <em>sorry</em> doesn't cut it, you make amends with action.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Daddy Sings Bass

**Author's Note:**

> Set after episode #1.3, 'The Devil in the Dark'.

Nolan wakes feeling like shtako, ninety percent sure he hasn't really slept. The bed is still an alien soft, after life on the road; the voices outside too near for instinct to ignore. He spends most nights just blinking at the dark, daring it to take him. Most of this one he spent watching Irisa, wondering where it's taking her: if she'll ever again let him come.

There's a noise down the hall. On reflex he reaches for his weapon, before his brain sparks to life and pinpoints the source: a dainty pair of feet, hurting hard floor. He follows the trail, the way he used to track tech, and at its end finds Irisa. She's in their tiny kitchen, fully dressed, clattering around in a search. She snaps up her head, and glowers in greeting.

Nolan reads her face, searching for more: the look that says he's not wanted, and not forgiven. But she seems more grumpy than hostile. For the first time all night, something flutters inside him that skirts dangerously close to hope. He flashes a hesitant smile; wanting to tell her that he held her hand while she slept, just to hear her threaten his fingers.

“We've run out of food,” Irisa growls instead.

It's not a bad substitute, on reflection: Nolan's pretty fond of having ten.

“Good morning to you too, sunbeam.”

“You can't starve us and expect me to help you keep law in this town.”

“I guess not,” Nolan says, ignoring everything that followed _us_. His smile grows bolder. Irisa mutters something about budgets and bedsprings, while Nolan tackles breakfast. The cabinets turn out bare, so he licks a finger and slides it along the countertop, looking for crumbs. Irisa's eyes roll so hard they vanish to the back of her head. So far, so normal. But the ground feels uncertain, and unsafe; both sides mined with hurt, and poised to blow. Peace is a fragile thing, apt to crack at the wrong choice of word.

He decides not to risk conversation. He switches on the track deck he found in the market, mouth opening up, ready to join in.

Irisa's face hardens. She sweeps past him, royally pissed off, and the next thing he hears is the splintering of wood as the door slams shut. Nolan blinks, and checks his breath.

Johnny Cash ignores the domestic and belts out the rest of his verse, accompanied by nothing more than the non-stop hum of Defiance, and the rumbling of its lawkeeper's stomach.

 

 

The stalls and shops in Defiance are hotspots for petty crime. Four of the vendors have reported stolen goods. Six townsfolk are carping about getting shortchanged, all strangely stumped on when. The pickpocket Tommy locked up before Nolan arrived has at least one successor, judging by the statements piled high on his desk. They've gotten bumped to the rear of the Do list, courtesy of invading hordes of Volge, hellbugs-turned-assassins, and far too many corpses.

Tommy looks surprised when Nolan decides to break from homicide and check it out in person. Maybe he divined the fact that Nolan is also going shopping, in a transparent bid to prove himself as a parent. So what if he knows nothing about visions: he can still keep Irisa warm and fed.

“If you're looking for Irisa,” Tommy tells him, being a small bit sharper than he looks, if not a closet psychic, “she went on her dinner break.”

“Wow,” Nolan says, slipping on his jacket. “We have those?”

“She's at the Irathients' new homestead. They picked her up when you were out with the mayor.”

“Yeah,” he says quietly, looking for the most conspicuous place to set his pouch. “Of course they did.”

He remembers what grocery shopping was like, when he was a kid. Sparkling floors, in place of dirt. Orderly aisles to navigate, instead of a dusty, teeming warren. Oranges were orange back then, not a toxic shade of pink. Cod had one pair of eyes, before terraforming added twelve. Nothing chased you, or bit you back—except for security.

That's him, these days. He scares off two hapless thieves in the bakery: one with a look, the other a broken toe. Ten minutes' surveillance at the otter stand catches him another, and a free otter to boot. The butcher confesses that his over-priced horse is really seaswine; the cranberries Nolan impounds next are nothing but roe, stained red with blood. He swaps talk of cake with Rafe McCawley's cook, who helps find his shortchanger: a merchant called Sal, who deals in pow by day, and forged scrip bills by night.

“The numbers must've rubbed off,” he whines from the mud, as Nolan waits for Tommy to come pick him up.

One of the peddlers sells paintings. There's a view of a beach, golden sand lined with palms, that reminds him of his postcard: the mirage of Antarctica, that he persuaded Irisa to swap for Defiance. He thinks about buying it for her. They have a home, now, not just a roller: cosy beds, a nice clean kitchen, and walls that need their stamp.

But Irisa doesn't need reminding that he upset her on that score, too. Gifts won't fix things, any more than a singsong. He leaves the painting behind and pushes back through the throng, on the hunt for toothgum.

It's a pretty productive way to spend an hour, all things considered. He solves some crime, buys some food, and gets a discount on almost everything—even from the kid he hires to cart it all home. The pickpocket eventually takes the bait, and lifts the pouch. Nolan doesn't see them coming, but he doesn't much care. Once the ochre inside dusts them green, even the metal in orbit will spot them in the crowd.

On the way back to the office, chewing on an orange's poor relation, he sees Irisa, also arriving back, with Sukar by her side. Nolan watches, across the street, as Sukar thumps his chest in farewell, and pats her on the head. He damn-near ruffles her hair; Irisa damn-near beams back, eyes lit in worship.

It makes Nolan's gut snarl. He stuffs the orange in his pocket, hackles rising as everything else sinks. The smart thing would be to walk over, and go inside. Ask how the Riders are getting on, what she's learning, if Tommy's maybe got a recipe for otter. When _sorry_ doesn't cut it, you make amends with action. Swallow down the pain; earn back what you never imagined you'd lose.

He turns around instead: no better equipped to deal with this kind of episode than the sort it sprang from.

 

 

Kenya has been on a shopping trip, too. Nolan likes the scarf that shimmers like jewels in her dark hair, and feels silky soft on his wrists; he's less impressed with the sticky oil she anoints him with after. He spent too long scrubbing off the stench of hellbug shtako to be replacing it so soon.

“Stop wrinkling up your nose,” she says sternly, nudging him on his back with a knee.

“It's _tikkablossom_.”

“It's _divine_.”

“It's sending me to sleep,” Nolan counters—a not unwelcome prospect—as Kenya slides up and straddles him. “Ohh-kay. I'm awake.”

In truth, the sex has made him as relaxed as it's possible to be, this side of conscious. Kenya's clever touch has stolen his cares. There's a haze at the edge of his senses, and a slackness to his body. He feels vaguely disconnected from it; a divergent part, spinning slowly away. Kenya glows above him, bathed in pink light, circling her like a halo. The scent of her mingles with the oil, slick and warm and heady.

“Is it me,” Nolan says, lips heavy with the effort, “or is it really, _really_ hot in here?”

“Scorching,” Kenya purrs, marking a line up his chest with one painted nail. She stops at his throat and sits back, head tilted. “You're sweating like an otter. You look like shtako.”

“Well, don't take it personally. It's been that sort of day.”

“You weren't like this before,” Kenya says, hopping off the bed and retrieving the bottle of oil. She shakes it, suspicious. “Maybe you should go see the Doc, just in case.”

Fun and games over, Nolan drags himself up, parting the veils in a hunt for his pants. “No time for that... Gotta get back to work. Oh yeah—if a fluorescent green face pops in, you give me a hail. Their friendly local lawkeep would like a word.”

Kenya cleans her hands on a towel, lips quirking. “Is there a reward?”

“You can come watch me jail them.”

“Have you got space for another murderer?”

“This one's a thief,” Nolan says with venom.

She drapes herself back on the bed as he—very slowly—dresses. “How is Sukar doing?”

Nolan really isn't trying to put on a sexy unstrip show. It's just that his limbs aren't behaving themselves, all of a sudden. “Next time he comes through here,” he says, grudgingly certain of it, “you can ask—”

He jolts mid-sentence, attention drawn to a skittering sound, coming from somewhere underneath him. “What was that?”

Kenya frowns. “What was what?”

“Have you got a bug problem in here?”

She shudders. “That's not funny, Nolan.”

“It's not meant to be,” he says, eyes following the scuttling.

Kenya bends down and lifts the sheets to check beneath the bed. She raises herself back up, one eyebrow arched. “There's never a dull moment with you, is there?”

She starts weaving the scarf back through her hair, an intricate dance of fingertips and fabric. Nolan can't take his eyes off of it. She really is something. Something incredible. Incredibly _different_ , in a way he can't seem to define. Kenya combs out her tresses, and knots the scarf at the end. It glistens in the light, threads of silinum twisting into gold. Nolan ponders the illusion. Maybe it was gold all along, and he just couldn't see it. You make the best guess you can: and sometimes you get it wrong.

“When did you go blonde?” he wonders—five seconds before the hellbugs jump out from their hiding place, and start chewing through his leg.

 

 

“What have we learned?” Doc Yewll's voice says.

Nolan opens one eye. Her face swims into focus. She's peering down at him, like he's a mildly interesting specimen in a petri dish.

“Don't skip breakfast?” he ventures.

She brandishes a half-bitten ball of fiery, pitted nostalgia. Nolan snaps open the other eye.

“Is that my orange?”

“The vendor calls it a crabricot,” Yewll says. “I've been testing it while you snored the afternoon away on my table.”

He pulls himself up, noting the dimming shaft of light, poking through the swing doors. “The meds must have knocked me out.”

She fixes him with those sharp, sceptical eyes. “Perhaps they grew limbs, when I wasn't looking.”

Nolan checks his own set of limbs. They're stiff but responding, and blessedly intact; cooled down to something approaching normal. The odd one out is his right hand. It wasn't this sore when he came panting in, pursued from the NeedWant by a tribe of wolf-headed fish. Now it feels halfway to broken, like he's punched something out, or gotten it trapped in a vice. The skin is leaching heat; turned a sunburn red by pressure.

Yewll taps at the fruit. “It's highly psychotropic. To humans—I'm still determining the effects on Votans. Irathients would probably avoid eating it... They have a more acute sense of smell. As for the rest...” She sighs. “I expect I'll be bombarded. I can hardly wait. At least you had the sense to _realise_ you were hallucinating.”

“I'd be safer foraging blindfold in the Badlands,” Nolan complains. “I could kill myself there for free.”

“You're a very dramatic human,” Yewll says. “Your chances of survival were a solid eighty-nine percent.” She holds up the fruit, towards the fading light. “I doubt it was deliberate. I suspect this particular specimen is a mutant strain.”

“It's a damned health hazard. First chance I get, they're coming off the market.”

“Already taken care of by your deputy,” she says. “You've trained her well. She's almost efficient.”

He stares at her, digesting the words, and the implication. “Irisa was here?”

“How else would I know what it's called?”

Nolan looks down at his hand. “Go on then, Doc,” he says eventually, since Yewll is still hovering next to him, like there's something he's missed. “Give it to me. What am I supposed to have learned, exactly?”

“Don't skip breakfast,” she says. “It stops you snacking on psychoactive fruit.”

Lecture given, she glides away with her quarry, back to her science. Nolan sits in encroaching darkness, cradling his hand; holding on to borrowed warmth, as long and tight as he can.

Resisting the prospect of having to let go.

 

 

Irisa arrives back late. Nolan isn't exactly early, by the time he's been granted a clean bill of health, and handed over bills of a different sort to settle yet another. He thinks about giving her a curfew, to go with the beds and kitchen. It's a restraint that doesn't fit her. It doesn't fit _them_ —but it goes just fine with walls.

He's trying to build them a home. From an Irathient point of view, maybe it's nothing but a cage.

She paws at Nolan's wares, more nosy than a help, as he puts them away. It's a miracle there's anything left, the delivery kid having dumped the lot on the doorstep. Nolan really shouldn't have bartered him down so far. Hell, he maybe should have tipped him; his otter might still have its legs.

The cabinets fill up in silence, only the hiss of flame from the stove quieting the buzz outside. The night is drawing in, and there's a chill in the air. Sukar can't be much good at sandwiches, because Irisa seems ravenous: she wolfs down some rootbread, then swipes a bag of sun-dried boar ears and starts munching through them. You can't make awkward conversation with a full-up mouth. But Nolan's lost his taste for eating, and it's an excuse he doesn't have.

“You have a good day?” he says.

She nods, wary as a kitten. Something civil struggles through her lips. It sounds like, “You?”

“It had its high points,” Nolan says.

Irisa smirks. She tries to suppress it, and fails. Chewed-up crumbs of ear scatter from her mouth, choked out by laughter. It's a sound he hears only rarely, and it's infectious. More than that, it's an opening—and Nolan didn't survive this far by ignoring one of those.

He tells her about the imaginary hellbugs, describing in gruesome detail the feast they made of his leg. Irisa is tickled by the wolf-headed fish, so he embellishes somewhat: by the time he's finished, they weren't just chasing him, they were wearing dresses and singing in Casti. He tells her how it felt, to see the arch collapse into history; to watch as Doc Yewll turned into Varus, armed with sharp objects, come looking for his thieves.

He leaves out his vision of Kenya, morphing into Amanda, on the grounds of good taste.

In between a second bag of ears, Irisa tells him about the fruit seller, who tried to bribe her with a coconut when she read him the riot act. The green-faced pickpocket is lighting up a cell; Tommy having chased her around the Hollows and back before making the arrest. She doesn't mention her lunch date with Sukar, and Nolan isn't too upset about that. It's still too raw a subject to be freely shared, or easily heard.

Maybe Irisa is protecting him from the truth of it, the way he unwittingly did for her. It's a path she has to walk, leading her places he can never go. Like it or not: the only one who can guide her on this journey is Sukar.

But Sukar isn't here, soothing bad dreams in the dark. Irisa has a full belly and hot-blood cheeks, and that's down to Nolan. She might prefer to wander free, stove replaced by campfire, and ceiling by sky. But she keeps coming back to him. For all its alien trappings, that's what makes this a home.

Nolan rifles indecisively through the cupboards, his appetite growling its return. Irisa draws closer, sniffing at the legless otter.

“What are you making?”

“It's an ancient, time-honoured classic,” he says. “Called _whatever I find first_.” He opens the icebox and pulls out the closest items: greasy tubers, salt-veined cheese, and a slab of something the butcher swore on his sales permit tastes like chicken. “You can chop. Watch the fingers...”

Irisa makes an _A_ _re you kidding me?_ face. She whips out a knife and bisects a tuber, faster than his eyes can keep up.

“ _My_ fingers,” he elaborates, as the breeze rushes past.

It's the most comfortable silence he's known all day, flush with shared purpose. Someone screams, loud and shrill, through the static outside. He slaps a hand on his holster, as Irisa grabs a bigger blade. The scream segues into laughter: it's a bunch of kids, joking around. The din of Defiance, busy getting on.

Nolan looks at Irisa. She looks back at him. Agreement reached, he switches on the music, and in baby-step increments, turns up the volume. Johnny Cash is singing about black land and troubled souls, and the promise of silver linings.

They hum along together, almost in time, and just a little out of tune.

 

 


End file.
